My blog

About me

A vegan blogger, freelance writer, and food stylist, Betsy DiJulio wrote “The Veggie Table” column for Norfolk, VA’s Virginian-Pilot newspaper. A lifetime cooking enthusiast, Betsy has worked as a caterer, taught private cooking classes, and has also won national recipe competitions. As a writer, DiJulio focuses on topics of vegan and organic food, art, art education, home and garden design, small businesses, and green initiatives. Her first cookbook, The Blooming Platter Cookbook: A Harvest of Seasonal Vegan Recipes, is being published by Vegan Heritage Press in spring 2011.

Her vegan recipe blog, The Blooming Platter at www.thebloomingplatter.com, offers a growing collection of recipes for creative appetizers, beverages, snacks, soups, salads, sides and entrees with a tendency toward ethnic fusion dishes, lightened-up comfort foods and updated classics with a twist. A baker since childhood, she also includes a burgeoning selection of dessert recipes that will tempt even the staunchest dairy-lover. In addition, sidebars provide a recipe index plus expanding lists of her favorite vegan blogs and other websites, cookbooks, facts, tips, restaurants and food-based memoirs and novels.

A practicing artist, Betsy DiJulio, M.A., Ed.S., is a full-time art teacher at Princess Ann High School in the Virginia Beach (VA) City Public Schools, where she was chosen as the 2010 Citywide Teacher of the Year. This "official artist" for the Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon in Virginia Beach teaches beginning through advanced placement courses to both general education and International Baccalaureate Middle Years and Diploma Program students.

This longtime vegetarian-turned-vegan is an animal rights supporter and Virginia Beach SPCA volunteer. DiJulio and her husband, Joe, have been married since 1990 and share their home with a pack of beloved canines.

Cooking Influences

My mama, Sallie Gough, of course. And both late grandmothers: Cammie Jackson, the country cook (my paternal "Mam-ma") and Virginia White, the city cook (my maternal "Nana"). More recently, the influence of the Food Network is immeasurable, as are the many vegan cookbook authors in my collection and a host of vegan bloggers.